Shapes & Toddlers

I occasionally go to the library and just LOOK around for better ideas to teach my toddlers. One such day I was looking at all types of shape books and just happened to come across this gem! It is called "Shape Capers" by Cathryn Falwell - it rhymes, is fun and engaging for toddlers but best of all they have a repetitive line that can easily be made into a game AND they make all their shapes into different things at the end of the book - and if you are a teacher you are already on the same page - instant art project!!

 

This is exactly what I did. I read the book to my kids. Then I made this handmade "Shake the Shapes" game which can easily be made out of any cylinder container (I made mine out of a chocloate covered pretzel container from Christmas). (In the middle of the container I covered it with a solid color paper and then wrote with sharpie on the front "Shake the Shapes".) I said the repetitive line of "shake, shake, shake, shake the shapes" and then asked what shape will ______ pull out? And then I let each child in turn pull out one shape from my jar and we had to identify what shape they pulled out!

When we were done with all that I used the picture from the book to make the spaceship out of the shapes we learned about. The kids loved seeing their art next to the picture in the book. It helped them relate and brought the book to life!

It was a wonderful resource and after returning my copy to the library I purchased one to keep in my classroom! If you are teaching your toddler shapes (or are a toddler teacher like me) I highly recommend this book to you!

Valentine's Ideas

Yes I realize it is March. Yes I realize Valentine's was almost a month ago but if I tried to save these cute ideas we did until next year JUST to post them BEFORE the holiday then I'd forget. Trust me I would. I'm like that. So I thought I'll post them now and YOU can try to save the idea somewhere until next year! Cruel aren't I?

First I had to share this picture of my daughter in her preschool class. They do the classic Ice-Cream party where you collect every imaginable horribly sweet junk food you can find and let the kids make their own sundaes!

This is not for the faint of heart I will warn. Huge amounts of sugar are sure to be devoured by your little one! You've been warned.

As for my class with my energetic 2 year old's I started the morning with heart shaving cream trays!Just make hearts with your shaving cream and place a plastic car beside it for them to vroom around in it with and get nice and messy! And believe it or not when the two year old's had the trays versus putting the shaving cream directly on the table (which I'm known to do at times) they did keep it pretty well contained to their tray and their space. This even helped keep it off their clothes a little more! Huge accomplishment in my eyes.

We read lots of cute books which I really should have taken a picture of but I remember one was Corduroy's Valentine's Day and another one was Elmo's Fuzzy Valentine. Cute books and age appropriate. And we did too much art to explain but the one I wanted to share was this VERY simple idea for a card from your little one:

Make their hand prints where their thumbs face down and their pointer fingers almost touch and you will have a heart shape in the middle!! I glued a heart in the space to make sure the parents saw the heart shape. This would be easy to do for grandparents or aunts and uncles and pop it in the mail. This was a SIMPLE version but you could really jazz it up some and make it look even nicer. Happy crafting!

Valentine's Day Bulletin Board Idea

Here is a simple and cute bulletin board idea for the toddler classroom. The way it is shown here is by taking a coloring page of I think it's Tenderheart bear?? and having each child color their bear (pink for the girls and blue for the boys) Then I took ink stamp pads and put the kids thumbprints in the heart on the tummy and the pads on the paws and ears.

I used pink for the girls and purple for the boys.

Other alterations could include:

1. Printing out the kids faces and gluing them onto the Care Bear's face so it's literally YOUR students on the board!

2. If kids are older you can have them paint or decorate with something fuzzy like yarn or cornmeal or sugar (just dye the cornmeal or sugar to desired color).

3. If you have a small enough group print out all the different Care Bears (tenderheart, hugs and tugs, braveheart, grumpy, etc...) and each child can be THAT Care Bear!